Well, if you were with UGN Security a long time you would rate me a 4-5 anyways. at least I hope that you would. About the article, as I said, its long. Real long. so I might type some of it tonight and some later on and post as I go.

The Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series has emerged as one of video games' best-selling franchises, topping the sales charts continually and annually. The formula that Neversoft has developed has proven to be overly addictive and something that gamers, no matter how much they try cannot put down. It has essentially become the premium video game drug of choice. In terms of replay value, nothing can top it. As for the level of skill involved, it's setting a new standard with each passing release. Although the calisthenics involved hold true to sitting on you butt and staring at a TV while gingerly pressing buttons; this in, in fact, a major contribution to the goal of elevating games toward the level of a sport. Michael Jordan would shoot hoops for six hours a day to improve his game and Tony Hawk players across the country are doing just the same: practicing day and night, in hopes of becoming the greatest digital skateboarder in the world, the response this series has generated is terrifying.

With status like this, it would seem unnatural – suicidal even – for Neversoft to scrap their award-winning formula and try something different all within the span of one year. Ad mind-altering as this revelation may be, Neversoft is intent on reworking the entire engine from the ground up. “We started over again… to a very large degree,” exclaims Joel Jewett, Neversoft's President. As brilliant as Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 may have been, successfully making the technology transition from the PlayStation to the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube, the final product didn't embody the vision that the development had originally intended. Producer Scott Pease elaborates, “We wanted to take the game in a new direction, but knew we wouldn't have enough power with the old engine. We built Tony Hawk 3 on Renderware. That enabled us to ship the game on time. This year with Tony Hawk 4, we scrapped Renderware and are rewriting our engine. It's a daunting process, but [we] had to do it.” For most developers, a maneuver of this caliber would equate to years of planning and coding. Neversoft seems confident that it can so it within a year and release all three versions on the game on time for the holiday season. Seeing how awestruck we were over this startling announcement, Scott calmed our nerves by saying, “We're keeping a lot of the core physics and stuff like that. Really, what we wanted to do was make the levels much bigger and more alive than ever before.” The fact remained, however, that Neversoft had to accomplish this task within a year – not even a year. Always confident, Joel boasted, “Pound for pound, we can churn out more than any other developer, baby! Tony Hawk 4 is bigger and better!”